By Sarah Vander Schaaff A few days ago, my youngest daughter woke up before six, came into my bedroom, took my iPad and selected a show to watch on Netflix. About twenty minutes later, when I rolled over to see what had entertained her so nicely and given me a chance to sleep just a bit longer, I noticed what she’d selected. Yes, my five-year-old was watching “The Family Guy”. And so we come to yet another question for our summer series: how much TV is ok to watch? Another question might be, how can I limit what my five-year-old selects from our instant queue, but that’s probably a post for a different blog. When it comes to watching TV… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Friday is the first day of summer, officially, but around here, some of us have been out for weeks while others are still making up “snow” days. Still, we will continue our summer series on pertinent questions with one aimed at what do when the final school bell rings. What’s the best use of summer if your child has been diagnosed with a learning difference? For this we asked a member of the Mindprint Team with more than a decade of experience teaching at a school dedicated to students with learning differences. As you might expect, her top recommendation is school. “If that is not an option, consistent tutoring throughout the summer and academic summer camps… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff This summer, we’re going to focus on some specific questions parents might have about development and, well, life. Sometimes we’ll turn to some experts for advice, and sometimes we’ll turn to you—experts in your own right. We start with a question on many of our minds as the schedule of the school year gives way to free time: When do you let your child walk to a friend’s house alone? This is a variation on the “when do you let your child walk to school alone,” a question answered extremely well by Gavin de Becker, an expert on the predication and management of violence and author of Protecting the Gift. Mr. de Becker has a “Test… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Of course, Vince Vaughn and I are often thinking about the same things. This week, for example, I planned on writing about internships, and sure enough, he beat me to it with a new movie called The Internship. Perhaps he was also driving in his minivan when he heard a story on Marketplace back in March that put the power of the internship in context. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Marketplace surveyed employers and found that internships were the most important thing considered when “evaluating a recent college graduate.” The Marketplace website quotes Dan Berrett, a senior reporter at the Chronicle, saying candidates’ internships were “…more important than where they went to college, the major… Read More